Swear To Me
by BirdbyBird
Summary: This is set after the final scene of The Last of Us and is inspired by Neil Druckmann's interpretation of the game's ending. Here, Joel has to stop controlling and manipulating Ellie before they can be together. Rated for sex and language.
1. Swear To Me

'Swear to me,' Ellie said. 'Swear to me that everything you said about the fireflies is true.'

Ellie had been dissatisfied with Joel's cheeriness since he had pulled her out of St. Mary's Hospital. He had lied so unreservedly and didn't seem guilty at all. Rather, he was happier than she had ever seen him. In the car on the road back to Tommy's, he had been talkative, and once the anesthesia had completely run off Ellie, Joel had begun planning how their days ahead would run. _We're finally goin' to teach you to how to swim_, he had said. _Have you ever learned an instrument?_ he had asked her.

What Joel didn't talk about was why Ellie was wearing a surgical gown if the fireflies had no intention of performing surgery. He didn't explain why they had left the hospital, without letting Ellie reunite with Marlene, without the guns Joel was promised, and without most of Joel's ammo, explosives, and alcohol. In fact, Joel would talk about anything except the things that Ellie needed to discuss. Even when she had brought up Riley—when she had finally decided to tell Joel what was haunting her—why finding a cure was important to her—he changed the subject. As always, her thoughts weren't important because they didn't fit the grand narrative of Joel and Ellie enduring and surviving together.

She was giving him one last chance to acknowledge her. He had one last chance to treat her as an equal.

Joel hesitated. She couldn't tell if he was surprised by the question or readying himself to lie again.

'I swear,' Joel said.

He was too good at lying. He didn't explain himself further. He didn't even blink.

Ellie couldn't help but look down. She felt the possibility of tears. It never occurred to her that she could lose him in the space of only two words.

But that was it. Not only he had robbed her of the most important moment of her life—of what was perhaps _the meaning of her life_—but he couldn't face her and try to make it better. Suddenly, when she looked at Joel, her friend, he wasn't there. Instead, a defiant escort stood in his place. The man standing there murdered innocent people and let the rest of the world die.

'Okay.'

Joel's shoulders relaxed.

Then Ellie said, 'I'm going now.'

'Excuse me?' he asked he innocently, probably sure that he misheard her.

'I'm sorry. But I can't listen to you anymore. I can't trust you. Not after everything.'

'Ellie, what are you talking about?'

'I saw another road a mile back. I figure that there have to be more around here, and I can find—'

Joel waved his hands between their bodies. He shook his head and leaned in. 'Slow down. What are you saying? You want us to turn around?'

'Me. I'm turning around. I—'

'You're not going anywhere on—'

'Dammnit, Joel! Listen to me!' Ellie yelled.

He was still for a moment, but eventually put his hands on his hips and listened.

Ellie expected that she would want to touch her hair nervously or pick at her nails. She surprised herself with her conviction as she looked him in the eye.

'Now, I'm sorry. I am. But this isn't going to end any other way. I'm not going with you to your brother's; I'm not going anywhere with you.'

Joel's body kept completely still, though his face had softened. For the first time, he hadn't stolen control of the conversation.

Ellie continued, 'You don't want to tell me truth… that's how it is—'

'I didn't lie to you—'

'Just don't. Don't worry about it. You're not my father anyway. You don't owe me anything.' Ellie stopped because she didn't want to cry. She ground her teeth together and drew a breath. As she was looking down, she noticed that mud had begun to seep into her sneaker. She stood back onto firmer ground. When she looked back up, Joel was leaning slightly in her direction, but he didn't dare step closer. For a second, his lip quivered.

'But,' he began, 'I saved you.' His face kept making movements as if he were tossing between things to say, but his words escaped on his breath. Consequently, his lips moved without sound.

Ellie pitied him but it wasn't enough for her to love him again.

'We saved each other, right?' she said.

This time Joel looked down. His shoulders buckled.

'What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?' His tone wasn't judgmental. Rather, he sounded genuinely worried for her. Ellie would remember that.

'I've got a plan.'

Joel's bottom lip rolled forward, and then, to pull himself together, he pressed his two lips together. Modestly, his fist covered his mouth as he shook the emotion out of him. _That a boy, Joel,_ Ellie thought.

'Here,' Joel said as he took the car keys out of his pocket.

Ellie was shocked. His large, callused hand shook as he held it open for her. The metal almost seemed to glow against Joel's brown skin and black hair.

When Ellie said, 'Thank-you,' she wasn't only thanking him for the keys, but for his co-operation. Her throat constricted.

Joel pulled off his backpack and kneeled on the ground. He unhooked his shotgun, his rifle, and his bow, then gestured for Ellie to turn around. Using Caribbean clamps and the straps hanging from Ellie's bag, he fastened the weapons to her back. Ellie stood still as she felt him shift the bag while he worked. Her eyes watered. When he stepped back for her to turn around again, she pretended to brush her fringe away so that she could remove her tears.

'That's great,' she said, not meaning to sound so upbeat. Her tone made Joel flinch and look down again. Really, she was already beginning to feel lonely.

Ellie held her arms out and moved closer. Awkwardly, Joel jerked forward and let her hug him. His arms barely touched her back, but his warmth made Ellie feel close to him in what, to her, could be their last moment together. She pressed her face against his hard chest. A button on his shirt dug into her cheek, but she didn't move, because she could hear his pulse in that spot. It was slower than she expected.

Pulling away, Ellie pushed hair out of her eyes so that she didn't have to look at Joel's face. Stepping backwards, she raised an arm stiltedly in a weak indication that she was leaving. Joel stayed where he was. She had never seen him like this before. Even when he was holding onto life on the icy floor of a garage, he still had an air of strength about him, as though he wouldn't ever give up.

Ellie wanted to say goodbye, but she couldn't. She left him standing perfectly still in the woods, turned around, and walked away.

xxxxx

Joel was in shock. He still wasn't sure what had happened. His mouth was dry and his eyes were wet and Ellie wasn't in his sight. He waited for her to come back. He could still feel the warmth of her body against his. If it were possible, he had no thoughts, or rather, no sentences were strung together in his head. There was only a series of feelings. Confusion. Shame. Pain. Fear.

Joel heard the engine start and the car rev away.

Fear.

_Oh God._

'Ellie!' he called.

Joel jumped off the rock and down into the creek below. He ran toward the fence, stepped onto a paling and lifted himself right over the wire. He found himself standing in the dust left behind the car. He started running down the road. The car wasn't in sight.

'Ellie, oh God, Ellie,' he repeated to himself as he ran.

He noticed a track in the woods to his right, so he ran through it, hoping that it might lead around the bend where the road continued. He ran through the woods, dodging trees, and avoiding puddles. He regretted turning off the path because he couldn't tell how close he was getting. His arms were shields against the odd branch in his way. The slender twigs cut his forearms.

'Ellie!' he yelled.

When he caught up with her car, Joel was going to pull her out, wrap his arms as tightly around her as he could, squeeze her waist in his hands, and kiss her so hard on the lips that his whole mouth covered her. _Fuck. Fuck._ Joel hadn't thought about kissing her like that before, but now that she was leaving it seemed so obvious. He had to kiss her. She couldn't leave without him telling her that he loved her and that he would throw himself on a landmine for her. It wasn't even that he was afraid of being alone. He'd been alone before; he could handle that. He wasn't afraid of anything but being without her.

Joel remembered the night they had spent in the radio tower. He hadn't recalled this scene before, because the next morning, both Sam and Henry had died, and with them, any happy moments around them had died too. But Joel remembered now.

After swapping car stories, Joel had fallen asleep on the floor near Henry and the stove. Ellie had come out of her room and dropped a blanket over each of them. Joel, who woke up, lightly grabbed her wrist and suggested that she lay next to him, as he guessed that she'd just given away the only blankets in the house. He could hardly see her face, but her hair was untied, and it fell messily around her shoulders.

In his half-asleep state, he hadn't considered that the bed in Ellie's room would be much more comfortable, but for whatever reason, she laid next to him under the blanket. Her shoulder nudged his arm and her naked foot brushed against his jeans. In a movement that felt completely natural to him, his hand grabbed Ellie's. He hadn't meant it as a romantic gesture, but did so out of need to be closer to her. She had held his hand in return and let him warm her smooth skin. As comfortable as he was with her little hand in his, the slightest movement of her fingers sent light shocks over his palm and up his arm. They both rolled to face each other, and, perhaps, due to chance, Joel's forehead touched the top of Ellie's head. He had felt a pull, not like a magnet, but like gravity, as though he were hanging in the air above her, drawing him closer to her, though he kept himself still. Resisting this pull kept him awake for a while, but eventually, his face rested into Ellie's knotted hair. They spent the whole night inhaling each other's breath.

When he woke up, Ellie was on the other side of the room. Her hair and shoes were tied, as if no time had passed between when he first fell asleep and that morning. Soon after, Ellie opened the door to check on Sam, and so the night before really did disappear.

Joel kept running through the woods. Although he would keep running until his feet wore down to the bone, his body was shutting down without his consent. His legs shook and his stomach cramped so badly that his shoulders spasmed too. Hobbling forward, leaning against each new tree, Joel gasped for breath. When he found a thicker tree, he finally stopped and pressed his forehead into the bark.

_She's gone._

Somehow, Joel had managed to walk back to Tommy's compound. Some men at the gate directed Joel to the demountable Tommy was currently in, as they now recognised Joel as Tommy's brother.

Joel found Tommy in a small office that wasn't as well held together as some of the other buildings. The walls hard warped, leaving gaps between the wall and the ceiling, and between the wall and the floor. Joel expected Tommy to be working in some way, but he was drinking at his desk. Next to an unmarked bottle, a candle was already lit, though the sun hadn't quite set.

'Little Brother?' Joel said from the door.

Before any other words were exchanged, Tommy asked, 'Where's the girl?'

Joel was prepared for this, though not with words. He had sealed himself shut in advance.

'She, uh… She's gone.'

Tommy's bottom lip lowered and his eyebrows titled. 'She…?' Tommy began to ask.

'Oh—no. She's fine,' Joel corrected. 'She just…' Joel cleared his throat. 'She just left.'

Tommy's expression immediately knotted and his head angled to the side. He wasn't quite drunk, but he was definitely tipsy.

'I don't understand,' Tommy said. 'I thought you two were partners or family or somethin'.'

'No.'

Tommy's hands dropped on the desk loudly, perhaps louder than Tommy had meant. 'Where is she?' he asked. 'Is she with some people?'

'I don't know,' Joel said as he sat down onto one of two foldout chairs beside the desk.

Tommy stood up and moved in front of the desk. He was leaning over Joel when he asked, 'You don't know?' Tommy wasn't aggressive, but sincerely confused and annoyed.

'Give me a break, okay? Just leave it.'

Joel leaned forward onto his elbows. His hands hung off the edges of his knees. Tommy, in an act of empathy, sat down too, and copied Joel's posture. Inadvertently, they leaned toward each other now, as if they were sharing secrets.

'You've gone through this before…' Tommy gently reminded him.

Joel lowered his head into his hands. He pushed his palms hard into his forehead. His fingers gripped his hair and pulled tightly until he felt his scalp tug away from his skull. Joel didn't want to hear the end of that sentence, because that sentence ended with _you can get through it again_. And that implied that Joel had once before _gotten through _it._ What the fuck does he think?_ Joel thought._ That at some point I was just healed—that at some point I stopped waiting for Sarah's eyes to open again?_

'Maybe—'

Tommy had changed his tactic, but before Joel had a chance to realise this he had groaned over the top of Tommy. In the next beat, Joel was up and walking to the other side of the room. He had a head spin, so had walked into toward the back wall, cornering himself.

He hadn't noticed from further away, but the pattern on the wallpaper was a small series of bouquets. That people would not only cover their walls with images of flowers—but with images of cut and bundled flowers—struck him as strange. The arm of moss that reached up the wall from a wet spot on the carpet seemed to be nature's way of correcting the irony. _This building must have always been here,_ Joel guessed.

The distraction had helped Joel steady his breath. With the back of his hand touching his own mouth, slowly, Joel faced Tommy.

It couldn't have been later than five in the afternoon, but the room was grey. Despite the thin shadows over Tommy, Joel could see that Tommy's eyes and cheeks were red. He wasn't crying, Joel decided, but he still could.

Joel must have been staring, because Tommy shrugged and looked his feet. '

I miss her too,' Tommy said.

Joel was sure that Tommy meant Sarah, but in that instant, he wished that Tommy had meant Ellie. He needed someone to understand how the needles tore at his chest every time he moved. _I've been so stupid,_ Joel thought._ I didn't just love her. I depended on her, I made her a part of me, like an arm or…_ Joel realised that there wasn't a word for the kind of surgery that had both stitched him and Ellie together and torn them apart. He wished that the word love wasn't so inadequate. Anyone could _love_. People _loved_ their cars. Joel didn't just _love_ Ellie. Even though he was sure that he and Ellie were bonded, he wasn't so arrogant to think that Ellie truly loved him. Somehow, to Joel, that invalidated his right to feel how he did. _Forget her. And move on,_ he forced himself to think. _Yeah_, he mentally scoffed. _Move on to where? Here? Be one of Tommy's construction workers and forget that I had the cure to humanity sleeping beside me?_

One of Tommy's offsiders, John, came in exclaiming about a room full of infected that might have antibiotics and other medicine. Apparently, some survivors out there had been trading with John, but no-one had seen them in weeks.

'And you're sure there's medicine?' Tommy asked.

'I'm telling you, there were a bunch of people held up in there for months. I know that they had drugs, because I was going to trade for them. They must've only just left, and they can't have taken everything. Maybe they made a run for the next town.'

'Or turned,' Tommy corrected him. 'I don't know. I don't want to send people out there for something that might not exist.'

Joel began, 'Don't you have people here who need that stuff bad?'

'Yeah,' John said.

'I'll go,' Joel said.

'What? No,' Tommy said authoritatively, despite the alcohol.

'You need it and I can get it. If what you need isn't there, I'll come back.'

John was smiling but Tommy kept his arms folded.

Joel kept a firm tone. 'You know it's not a problem for me,' he said to Tommy.

Joel didn't break eye contact even though John was moving around in his periphery.

'Okay.'

That night, Joel didn't slept. He laid on his side, in the room that was empty but for his mattress, and he stared out the window. He kept imagining Ellie sleeping in a tree, or in a cave. She wasn't safe out there. She should have been sleeping on _his_ mattress, and he should have been sleeping on the floor beside her. Although Joel knew that Ellie was strong and smart, and more than capable of survival, the world had a way of sneaking around that. In a way, he had pushed Ellie into fulfilling Marlene's prophecy._ Torn apart by a pack of clickers. Rape and murdered._ Joel whimpered. His short, dirty nails dug into his arm.

There was nothing that he could do for her now. If he searched long enough he could find her. He would search forever. But once he laid eyes on her again, what could he do? He couldn't tie her up and drag her home. At fourteen, she was already a woman. She had as much a right to make her own decisions as Joel did. And soon, she'd be turning sixteen.

But maybe he could have just kept searching for her. Maybe he didn't have to drag her home. Maybe, when Ellie left, if he hadn't been so hurt, he would have had the sense to keep following her. She'd hate him, but at least then he could keep her safe… no matter how much it hurt.

Joel laid his arms over his own chest, holding himself, imagining Ellie. Out of self-punishment, then, he made himself keep his arms by his side and list all the ways he had failed her. By the time the sun rose, he had decided that there was nothing and no-one left for him anymore. That night, he dreamt that he carried Ellie in his arms. She was wearing the hospital gown. When he lifted her closer to him he saw that her unconscious face was covered in blood. The blood ran through her hair an smeared his arms. _Don't do this to me, baby girl, _he whispered over and over._ Don't do this_.

The one-street town was a four-hour walk out of the woods. Joel had been travelling since sunrise so that he would have time to look for food… or check for teenage-sized footprints. He hadn't found anything but a couple of rabbits, which he decided not to bother chasing.

Since Joel had given Ellie his rifle, his shotgun, and his bow, the weight of his backpack was unfamiliar, and he had yet to adjust to the new equilibrium. As he walked into the broken street, he limped. He wondered if he looked like a cowboy strolling into main walk of town. _Not a bad set for a finale_, he darkly mused.

He found the building—an old post office—with the tall wooden door. A dumpster had been rolled in front of it, just how Tommy described.

The afternoon sun cut across the left side of his face and left a dark shadow to his right. The whole street was striped in gold and grey, though the stark contrast didn't at all reflect the consistent blandness that bled through his veins.

Joel stood outside the door. He wasn't sure if he could hear clicks coming from inside or whether those sounds were coming from his own imagination. A shiv was in his hand. Going through the motions, he went to grip it harder, but his hand was too stiff. Then both his hands started to shake.

Joel knew that he wasn't going to be fast enough with the shiv when the infected inevitably appeared at his side. He'd try to make a move, sure. He'd probably knock a few of them down, too. But at some point, maybe only a minute into a fight, his arms would start to thrash in slow motion and the infected would keep running at full speed. Like Tess and Sam and so many others before and after them, he would finally know what the jaws of a monster felt like as they broke through his skin.

For the sake of it, Joel gave himself a chance to change his mind. He tried to imagine how Tommy would feel when he didn't return the next day. He tried to imagine how whoever found his body, bloody, among stalks of clicker legs would react. Where he expected a cold stream of guilt to run down his throat into his chest and stomach, there was only numbness.

Although he didn't believe in heaven, he hoped that his life would flash before his eyes. Maybe then he'd see Sarah as clearly as he once could when she fell asleep with her head on his lap.

A sense of peace coloured the anesthesia in his gut.

He took a breath and opened the door.

The room was surprisingly empty. There was a counter, but no cash register. A bench and a chair to left, but no boxes or cabinets that Joel found would typically hold bandages and tools. The windows were boarded, and the splintered wood broke up the sunlight so that room was a soft yellow. Hesitantly, Joel stepped onto the floorboards. They creaked, but not enough to draw attention.

There was a doorway on the other side of the room, which, he guessed, led behind the counter and to a storage room. There must have been a small apartment upstairs too. Joel moved so that both feet were in the room. With his eyes still on the doorway, Joel returned the shiv to his side and pulled out his revolver. He rested a bottle of alcohol and a lighter by his feet. Then he let the door slam behind him.

The footsteps moved quickly and soon an infected was standing in the doorway. Joel lit and threw the Molotov. What turned out to be a runner burst into flames and his body became a burning wall between Joel and the other room. Two—or three—runners hurled themselves at the fire and Joel shot the first two in the head twice, but the third managed to fly less than two arm spans away from Joel before he shot him the neck. As the runner fell to his feet, two clickers appeared in the doorway above the crackling embers of the first runner's body. They both shook forward.

_Here we go,_ Joel thought. _This is it._

As the two clickers moved closer, a third and fourth clicker hurled themselves over the counter. It took Joel three shots to kill one clicker, and then his revolver was empty.

He took out his shiv and sliced the throat of the second clicker. The third and fourth neared. Joel, to his own surprise, grabbed the neck of the third to hold him away, then stabbed the fourth in the eyes, then the chin, until, finally, the shiv swiped its neck. The last clicker pushed Joel back into the door. Joel swiftly pulled out another shiv and let it go as the clicker dropped to his feet.

Heart racing, Joel pulled out his last shiv. He looked around the room and waited for the sound of more footsteps. Again, he looked around. Again, he listened. He waved the shiv in front of him, too smart to slow down. But then, as he looked at the bodies strewn across the floor, and noticed that he hadn't even stepped into the centre of the room, he realised that he had already killed them all.

There wasn't a sound. He couldn't even hear his own breath anymore.

He waited. He felt the desperation of an atheist praying to God. He needed to hear something. Footsteps. Screams. His own scream.

And then he was screaming.

Joel dropped on to his hands and knees and wailed. He sat up and held out his hands, looking for something to attack or strangle or throw, but he held nothing but the air. Still, he thrashed as though were monsters all around him.

_Why couldn't it just be over?_

After the yellow room turned sour and Joel noticed the smell more than the ache in his jaw, he stood up. His jeans were wet with infected blood, but his face had been dry for a while now. When he blinked, it felt as though he were rubbing two sheets of paper together.

He stumbled through the rooms and found some sheets with only little mould. He tore the clean parts free and used them as a sack to gather supplies. He didn't find antibiotics, but there were a lot of pill bottles with names he didn't recognise. Apart from those, there wasn't anything worth taking.

Joel walked back out onto the street. The sun was well under the horizon and the last chills of spring clung to the breeze.

For maybe an hour, Joel had been drifting back toward the woods. He ran pictures of Sarah through his mind: her cackle when he joked about finding her in a cabbage patch; the grey strands in her blonde hair; how her hair actually felt like silk. He used her as an anchor to keep him from wandering back to Ellie. God, he begged, _Why couldn't I have died with Tess?_

The sky was an ash blue. He had to keep moving if he was going to track back through the woods the way he came. Usually, Joel would carve notches in the trees he walked by, but he hadn't this time, as he didn't expect to be coming back.

The bridge Joel walked on was cracked. He had to keep his eyes to the ground so that he didn't trip in the deep crevices. He was out in the open, but the only other way to travel was to cross the river beneath him, and then he'd have to climb up the side of a steep hill. Besides, the area had seemed completely deserted. That's why Joel was surprised when he heard a woman scream.

Joel gripped his pistol and looked around. _Where is she?_ Then pain shot up Joel's arm and into his shoulder. He checked. An arrow stuck into his arm, just above his elbow. Definitely hit a tendon.

Joel turned and saw three men running up to him. They were maybe 30 seconds away. There wasn't anywhere to duck on the bridge. Holding his arm with the same hand he held his gun in, Joel shuffled to the scaffold. Metal beams stretched over his head, but they weren't as wide as Joel's body. He looked over the edge. The water was too shallow: the jump would break his legs. The men were now close enough that he could their faces. Neither of them could be older than 30. Joel squeezed the trigger. One of the men reacted with a jump, but he hadn't been hit. Fuck. Joel looked at the water again. Maybe if he landed headfirst…

Joel released his grip on the gun and let himself fall backwards. The last thing he saw before he dropped off the edge was each of the three men engulfed in flames.


	2. Alive

'Are you hungry?' Ellie asked the boy.

He nodded his head and his brown feathery hair fell over his forehead. His mother protectively laid her bony hand on his shoulder as Ellie held an arrow against her bow.

'Don't worry. We're going to find something together, okay?'

The mother answered for him: 'Thank-you,' she said.

Ellie kneeled by the bank and looked over the shallow creek. The water was clean except for rusted scrap metal catching in the current as the water passed broken cars and debris from a nearly-collapsed bridge upstream. The man with the hurt back stumbled on a rock as he inched down the steep hillside to meet up with Ellie. Instead of shushing him, she arched her shoulders and studied the water. The grey sky intermittently turned the surface into a mirror, so Ellie had to wait until her reflection was disturbed before she could see anything. Fish, smaller than her thumbnail, scooted around her muddy jeans. _So there has to be something bigger around_, she thought.

'I'm Karla,' the mother said. 'My son's name is Thomas.'

Ellie didn't respond as she was trying to keep her balance while she held her weight over the stream. She had shared her name earlier, though. Back when she had found the three of them, she'd introduced herself so that she could coach them into the car with her. _It's not safe out here_, Ellie had added. _And he doesn't look like he can run_.

'This is Ethan,' Karla said, probably gesturing to the man. 'He helped us out of the Quarantine Zone.'

_She must be nervous_, Ellie guessed.

A silver fish with a green shimmer sauntered toward Ellie. It was fat enough for at least three servings. Ellie reeled back her bow and released. Then she heard a woman's scream. For a second, she thought that the fish had screamed, but quickly realized that the sound had come from immediately behind her.

Karla covered her mouth with one hand and pointed to the top of the hill where three men in thick jackets were running. Her scream continued as an echo through the valley.

'Don't!' Ellie stage-whispered to her aggressively as she pulled Karla and down, out of sight. She gestured with her other arm for Thomas and Ethan to do the same.

Ellie loaded her shotgun and waited for the men to chase her. They were taking a while. _  
_

'I think I know those guys,' Ethan whispered. 'They attacked us in Orlando.'

Then Ellie, moving away from the hill, saw the three men head toward the bridge upstream. _Where are they going? Why would they ignore us? _Ellie followed their direction and saw a man halfway down the bridge. A man with a brown backpack. A man with dark hair and a green button-up. _Joel._

'Karla, I need you,' Ellie urged. She took out a bottle of alcohol and a rag. 'See those three guys?'

'They're going to kill us,' she cried.

'No, they're not,' Ellie assured. 'See this?' Ellie held up the bottle and a pack of matches. 'I need you to follow me. When you're close enough, light this and throw it.'

'What?' Karla said as she exhaled.

'Have you done anything like this before?'

Karla's bottom lip rolled forward and her eyebrows fell. 'Yes,' she confessed.

'Okay. Come with me.'

Karla's face scrunched and wrung out tears.

'Hey, hey,' Ellie hushed. 'We're going to get these motherfuckers, okay?'

Karla nodded unconvincingly. Ethan huddled up to Thomas in agreement.

Ellie, with her head down, scampered toward the bridge. She could hear Karla disturb the water and mud behind her. When they were next to the bridge, Ellie took out the hunting rifle and began to adjust the scope. She heard a gunshot. She looked up. The men were closer to Joel. But behind a support, Joel was still standing.

Realizing she had no time, Ellie started to climb the hillside, and she screamed out, 'Over here!'

She was hand-deep in mud, and kept slipping down. She wasn't going to make it.

'Throw it, Karla.'

Karla was shaking.

_Dammit_.

Ellie grabbed the Molotov out of her hands, lit the rag and tossed it toward the men. She didn't think that she had aimed accurately enough, but the bottle exploded against the scaffold and sprayed flames over the men's jackets.

'Oh my god!' Karla yelled.

Ellie turned to see what Karla was looking at when she saw a figure crash into the water a couple of car-lengths away. The splash obscured her view.

'Joel!' Ellie ran to him. In the deepest trench of the water, which was only waist-deep, Ellie found Joel bobbing to the top. He coughed and groaned.

'Joel!' she repeated as she lifted his head out of the water. His eyes stayed closed.

Karla sloshed over to them. Her long black skirt billowed around Joel's floating hair, which swayed like soft reeds.

Ellie pulled his torso out of the water and to her chest, and his hair flattened against his head. She began to drag him to the bank. Karla supported his waist. When they laid him in the mud, Ethan and Thomas were walking toward them suspiciously. Karla, too, stayed standing back as Ellie kneeled by Joel and checked that he was breathing. He was.

'I don't know if we can get him up the hill,' Ellie explained.

'Who is this?' Ethan asked.

'We were travelling together,' Ellie said. 'Maybe we can find another way out of this ditch.'

'Sorry, who is he?' Ethan repeated, unsatisfied with Ellie's vagueness.

'Joel. My friend, Joel,' she replied impatiently. 'Ethan, could you drive the car around and see if you can find a spot to get down here?'

Ethan seemed confused. He looked at Karla, asking her silent questions, then looked back at Ellie. 'Sure,' he said.

Ellie threw him the keys from her pocket. She knew that she shouldn't trust him with the car, but she was desperate, and she didn't think that Karla would just run off without Ellie. _But then again_, Ellie thought, _She only told me her name ten minutes ago…_

Ethan gave Ellie one last second for her to change her mind. When she said nothing, Ethan hobbled back to the gentler incline where they'd climbed down.

'Come on, Joel,' she said to him while stroking the hair away from his face, choosing to ignore the mother and child standing behind her awkwardly.

Joel's face seemed rougher than it did yesterday. The skin around his eyes was swollen and pink. 'What were you doing, Joel?' she talked to herself. 'Jeez…' she whined. Ellie wasn't sure if she was grateful to have him in her arms or frustrated that he found a way to become the most important part of her life again, and so quickly. She hadn't even made it a one hour drive away from him, yet Ellie felt like she was holding a ghost.

His body was cool. She wasn't accustomed to being the one to warm him.

'Can I… can I do anything?' Karla asked.

'No. Thank-you,' Ellie said.

She smelled fish. Ellie pivoted and Thomas was holding Ellie's arrow, which had the large fish hanging off the end. The fish hung over the pointed tip and its skin was breaking up as it slid over the tip. The boy's small hand held the opposite end of the arrow, struggling to hold the weight with such a narrow grip. He couldn't have been eight years old.

'That's going to break up,' Ellie said. 'Here.' She pulled the fish straight off the arrow, and held it flat across both hands. 'It won't bleed if it's dead.' Thomas held his palms out for Ellie to give him the fish to carry. Maybe she should have held it for him, but he had to learn. Karla looked on indifferently. The dark hair that clung to her face and frayed around her waist made the whites of her eyes seem wider.

Ellie climbed off her knees and sat in the mud by Joel's arms. She hunched over so that Karla couldn't see Ellie's fingers brush the hair and veins along his arms. When the air crept under her skin, Ellie heard a rumble and saw headlights beam from downstream. She stood up when Ethan parked the SUV.

Ethan's silhouette stepped out of the car and asked if everyone was okay. He helped Thomas into the front seat while Ellie and Karla carried Joel into the back, trudging through the shallow water. After Karla climbed in the front with Thomas and buckled them in with the same seatbelt, Ellie nudged herself under Joel so that his head rested on her lap. He groaned.

'Sarah,' she thought she heard Joel say.

Ellie rested one hand on Joel's forehead and the other on his arm. She looked out the window, into the dark, as Ethan drove them back to the road.

It had begun to rain when Ethan and Karla found the building they had been sleeping in. The headlights shimmered off the road and photographed each raindrop that fell in front of the car. Ellie waited for the others to organise themselves before she bothered to disturb Joel. She was tired in every way.

The three of them had disappeared inside and left the car doors open. Ellie was about to move when Joel said her name.

'Where are we Ellie?' he asked. Although his voice was heavy with pain, he didn't seem confused. It was as though he were simply asking her if she knew the name of the town they had wandered into.

'It's okay, Joel,' she said, unable to control the light in her voice. 'I'm right here. We're going to fix you.'

His neck and shoulders slumped back into Ellie's lap. A soft smile rested on her face.

Karla came to Ellie's door and helped her out. Together, they pulled Joel off the back seat, accidentally letting his feet hit the ground hard. Karla carried Joel's legs while Ellie wrapped her arms under his shoulders and around his chest. His head was fixed in the groove of her breasts.

Inside, there were nests of rags on the floor, and a tin bucket in the centre of the room. Unlike most buildings, the windows weren't smashed or boarded. Ellie hadn't seen much of this room this morning, when she brought the three strangers to their makeshift home. She had left them and gone to scavenge around the rest of the flat street. She hadn't noticed that in the back of the room there were wooden benches with metal clamps fixed to the sides of them. She also hadn't noticed that there was no lock on the door.

'Is this place safe?' she asked Karla. Together, they laid Joel onto a pile of rags. Ellie began moving the cloths around so that Joel's head was supported. He moaned.

'It was never meant to be a permanent place to stay,' Ethan said. He was arranging something inside the bucket: most likely, logs. 'But then those men showed up and we were kinda stranded.' A warm light scratched to life inside the bucket. Ethan shook his wet hair beside it. 'It'll do for now,' he said. Ellie wasn't sure if he meant the fire or the house.

'Do you know how to handle that fish?' Ellie asked the room.

Ethan assured her that he could gut and cook it for them all. Karla opened a window to let the smoke out.

'But there won't be so much for us now,' he said, looking at Joel.

'Too bad I didn't have some help catching it,' Ellie said, reminding Ethan that it was _she_ who was sharing with _them_. 'But don't worry. I'm not hungry. Joel can have my share.'

Ethan seemed torn. His blue eyes winced against the fire. He must have wanted to object, but his hunger didn't let him. Ellie understood.

The three strangers ate on the opposite side of the fire to Joel and Ellie. When Ellie realised that Joel wasn't going to wake up anytime soon, she offered his piece of fish to Thomas. To be polite, and also, to distance the smell of the food from Ellie, the three strangers shuffled away from the fire, giving Ellie some space with Joel. They were wary of him, and now, of her.

Joel's clothes were still wet and he hadn't warmed much. Ellie unbuttoned his green shirt, which sucked against his skin as she peeled it away from his body. The firelight flickered in the wet sheen of his chest and highlighted his black chest hair. The orange sheen coated most of Joel's scar; Ellie could only see the purple and red pulp along his stomach when she squinted, though the change in texture was obvious. She let herself stare, as the bucket hid her face from the others. Joel's nipples were hard against the alternating currents of warm and cold air. Her eyes drifted along the curves of his body and down to his hipbones, which formed an arrow pointing toward his belt.

She gently gripped Joel's collar and began pushing his shirt off his shoulders. She wasn't sure how to remove his arms from the shirt without waking or hurting him. His back would have hit the creek bed with a lot of force.

'Joel,' she whispered to him. If he didn't wake up she would want to sleep against him, and she couldn't do that now. He didn't belong to her anymore. He was a guard she escaped. Did she escape? Was he following her to bring her home?

'Joel,' she whispered louder. She pushed on his shoulder to wake him.

'Ellie,' he said without opening his eyes, as though it were an answer to a question.

'What were you doing out here?' she asked.

He lifted his arm that was closest to Ellie and touched her hand, then his arm flopped back beside him. 'Ellie,' he said again.

Ellie rolled her eyes. 'What are you doing? Why were you on the bridge?'

'I got you, baby girl.'

Ellie wanted to cry. Here he was again, rewriting Ellie's story so that she was his daughter. She was more than a replacement. Why wouldn't he let her get away from him and be more than that? She had once thought that _maybe_ she could be something more to Joel—that after they had left the Fireflies Joel might let Ellie be closer to him. Sometimes she'd catch him giving her a distant smile, which made him look perfectly content. Other times, he'd leave his hand on her back a little bit longer than he needed to. Maybe that didn't mean anything, but to Ellie, those moments promised intimacy.

After Joel told her that the Fireflies were failing their experiments and that they'd been unable to revive other immune people, he had been friendlier with Ellie, but she knew that it wasn't real. He'd pulled her closer so she couldn't see his lies. He probably assumed that she'd be so grateful for his attention she wouldn't question him.

'Is he alive?' Thomas asked loudly.

'Of course he's alive,' Karla assured him. Ellie, Ethan, and Karla tightened awkwardly, imagining how scared the poor kid must have been thinking that Ellie was tending to a corpse.

'He's hurt,' Ellie said. 'People heal when they're asleep, so he'll probably be out for a while.' She continued, 'He seems exhausted more than anything.' Her hand touched his arm.

Ethan and Karla were sorting through their backpacks. Ellie couldn't tell if they were a couple or not. She guessed that it didn't matter. They were what they were. Ellie watched them take inventory and listened to Ethan tell Karla about his back. They were smiling when she heard Joel again.

'Ellie,' he said.

'Yes,' she scoffed, not in the mood to indulge his dreamy ramblings. She looked down and his eyes were open.

'You're here,' he said.

'Joel!' she exclaimed loud enough to catch the others' attention. 'I'm here. You fell off a bridge.'

'Was that you screaming?'

'No.' Ellie had to think. 'That was Karla.'

'Oh,' he said. 'I didn't think that was you.' He smiled and closed his eyes again. Ellie thought that he would fall asleep again, but instead, he pulled his arms behind him and began to sit up.

'You're going to hurt yourself.'

'I'm okay.'

He hunched forward and looked around. Then he spotted Karla, Ethan, and Thomas.

'Hello,' he said. Joel was stiff, but casual.

'Hello,' Karla said emotionlessly.

'This is Ethan, Karla, and her kid, Thomas,' Ellie explained. 'They helped me pull you out of the creek and bring you here.'

He nodded at them.

Under his breath, he asked, 'How do you know these people?' He seemed aggravated now. One of his hands pressed on his back.

'I don't,' Ellie admitted. 'I was driving and one of them collapsed on the road.'

'And you stopped? What have I told you?'

'I know what you told me,' Ellie snapped. 'I stopped anyway.'

Joel screwed his face up and sighed in disappointment.

'Don't,' Ellie warned. 'I'm not okay with leaving people to die.'

Ellie huffed. _Good to see you too, Joel. _She wished that she weren't sitting so close to him.

He look at her curiously, squinting around her face.

'What?' she asked.

'You cut your hair.'

'Oh. Yeah.'

After trying to wash a bird's-nest-sized knot from the back of her head, Ellie decided that long hair was too impractical if she were to make it on her own. She sawed off her whole ponytail with her knife, so her hair was shorter at the back than the front. The longest strips of hair curled under her chin.

'I like it,' Joel said.

'I just needed a change.'

Joel fell quiet and didn't seem to be looking at anything, but rather, he stared at the space in front of Ellie's stomach. He was distant and slow. Brooding. Defeated. Old. Usually, he'd start a fight and find a way to silence Ellie without explaining anything.

Joel stood up and Karla flinched. He looked down and saw that his shirt was open. As he pulled the rest of it off and moved to the fire, Karla smiled, so he must have done something to reassure her that he wasn't a threat. Ellie noticed two large bruises cover the muscles of Joel's back. He held his hands over the flames.

'What can I do?' he asked.

Karla began to shake her head, but Ethan said, 'Nothing right now. But we've been trying to build some tools and supplies to set us on our way. We're looking for somewhere permanent to stay. Maybe fine a community or something.'

'Are you now?' Joel turned and looked at Ellie questioningly. 'And, uh,' he continued, 'Do you know of anything?'

Ellie widened her eyes to let him know that she hadn't told them about Tommy's, but Joel had turned back to the fire.

'Only rumours,' Ethan said. 'Some guys would come around trading supplies. We think there might be more of them around. Either way, we couldn't have stayed where we were. Place was surrounded by infected.' Ethan laughed. 'Not sure how we ended up in a post office in the first place.'

Ellie noticed Joel's back muscles tighten. Joel either scoffed or chuckled: she couldn't tell which.

'Where are you from?' he asked.

'Quarantine Zone in Orlando,' Ethan said.

'Ethan saved us,' Karla interjected. She fiddled with her skirt. 'He snuck us out of the zone when we were starving.'

'How'd he manage that?' Joel asked, unsuccessfully masking his bitterness.

Karla began, 'Ethan is—_was_—a soldier—'

'—He's heard enough about us,' Ethan cut in. 'What about you? How did you end up falling off a bridge?'

Joel crossed his arms. He looked down at the wet shirt on the floor behind him then picked it up. He held the shirt over the fire.

'Out lookin' for supplies,' Joel said. 'Nothin' special. Ellie and I had gone our separate ways… Guess that didn't stick.'

'You'll be hanging around?' Karla asked.

Joel stood up straight. 'Oh, I'm not going anywhere.'

Ellie shivered. She looked down at her nails, which had mud under them.

There was a strange tension in the room. Because Ellie couldn't see Joel's face, she couldn't tell if he were pushing Ethan. Thomas seemed calm; he played with a newspaper ship when he lost interest in the conversation.

Joel looked to the wooden benches in the back of the room.

'You got tools here?' he asked.

'A saw and a chisel,' Ethan answered. 'I was hoping I could use some of the scrap wood to make some weapons and cutlery and things.'

'I don't know about cutlery, but I could file down a stake for you.'

'Not now,' Karla said.

'I'm not doing anything.'

'Okay,' she said. 'I'll show you what we have.'

Karla led Joel to the other side of the room. Ethan went back to his inventory, but watched Joel intermittently. Ellie did the same. As Joel ran the chisel over the wood his shoulder blades seemed to breathe on his back. They rose and fell in a steady rhythm. His arm muscles became more prominent. Karla was smiling. Ellie couldn't hear too well but Joel's accent was thicker than usual as he said, 'It's not hard.'

Ethan stood up and walked over to Joel.

'Why do you hate soldiers, Joel?' Ethan asked. He tilted his head back.

'I didn't say I did,' Joel said.

'It's obvious.' Ellie wasn't sure what Ethan was referring to; she hadn't seen Joel's face during their conversation.

'You don't wanna hear it,' Joel said in a low, scratched voice. He hadn't looked up from the plank.

Ellie had stopped trying to be discrete. She sat forward and watched as Ethan moved to the table. He was directly opposite Joel now and he wouldn't take his eyes off the top of Joel's head. Joel shook his shoulders, obviously aware of Ethan's power play.

'You're just human,' Joel said. He rested the chisel on the bench and looked up at Ethan. Both of his palms stayed flat on the table. 'You're just people who took what they were given, who think that a uniform means you know something we don't. You think you have the right...' Joel's cheeks hardened. 'You're just taking orders from someone you don't know, whose taking orders from someone he don't know.'

'Well.' Ethan raised an eyebrow but was otherwise unchanged.

Karla said, 'He's not a solider now.'

Joel looked back to his chisel, but stopped when Ethan started again.

'I thought that you'd been around long enough to remember the days when soldiers were heroes.'

'That was a long time ago.'

Ethan was opening his mouth to talk again when Karla said, 'Help me with the buckets. We should get them outside while it's still raining.'

Ethan ambiguously half-smiled at Joel, turned and left the room with Karla, Thomas, and a stack of plastic buckets. Ellie and Joel were alone.

For the first time, Joel glanced at Ellie, which made her self-conscious, and a little guilty. What hurt, though, was when Joel simply went back to his work without saying anything to her. Ellie stood up.

'Why do you have to wave your dick around, Joel?'

'Excuse me?' He turned to her.

'They're nice people. They just need some help.'

'Ellie, I don't even know where I am. I ain't gonna roll over for some strangers, who could be anybody.' He walked toward Ellie and his arms moved in front of his chest as he spoke. 'You were supposed to be home. With me. At Tommy's. How am I supposed to behave? _And where are we_?'

He'd talked her into a corner, like always.

'We're an hour's drive away from Tommy's. And I didn't tell them about Jacksonville.'

'They already know about Jacksonville.'

'No, they don't.'

'They were trading with Tommy's guys. They just don't want you to know where they're headed.'

'Well…' Ellie began. She didn't expect them to tell her everything. 'That makes sense,' she said.

'Come home,' Joel said more than asked. His brown eyes held the firelight and his grey hair was gold.

'I don't trust you,' she admitted.

Joel turned his head away quickly as if he'd been punched.

'Wait,' Ellie corrected. 'That's not right. I do trust you.'

Joel's chest swelled as he inhaled.

'But I don't believe you when you say that you're protecting me. You're not. You're protecting _you_. I'm not your toy.'

'Is that what you think?' Joel continued in a mumble, 'my toy?'

'Yes.'

'Can we talk? Can we get out of this room?' He sounded desperate and claustrophobic.

Ellie nodded. Joel reached into his bag and pulled out a plaid shirt. As his arms wriggled into it, his chest strained forward. He buttoned it up in a huff and followed Ellie out the door.

Through the dark, they jogged to a bus stop with a shade cover. The moonlight had turned the thin water on the road into crystals. Because the seat was covered in something black and sticky, they sat on the ground among plastic bottles and broken glass from the shop front behind them. Their arms rested on their knees and Ellie's fingers caught rain spatter from the shelter. Joel rubbed his hands together. For the first time since she'd seen him again, Ellie could feel his warmth radiate away from his body. She couldn't help wanting to move closer; she was conditioned to work as a part of him.

'What did you want to say?' Ellie encouraged.

'Uh…'

Ellie's hips and stomach warmed and tingled. She wanted to press her pelvis against Joel's. She was still mad at him, but she needed him. She wanted to hurt him and bite him as she kissed him. Lack of experience meant that her daydreams didn't take her much further than pressing her whole body against him while she kissed the salt off his neck, but she knew what happened next.

Because most kids in military school were orphans, they were taught discipline and focus before anything else, and everything else was secondary. Out of necessity, all the kids became everyone became everyone else's teacher, swapping any information about sex that found its way into the school, through books and word of mouth. Since Ellie was six years old she had other kids, both older and younger, sharing ideas about what sex was and the different ways it could happen. When Ellie was twelve, starting her period and learning a bit about biology, she put the pieces together, realising what was myth and what was truth.

She also learned about diseases and contagions. Not long after Riley turned without Ellie did Ellie realise that she was probably never going to have sex.

And that didn't bother her. Not at first, anyway. She was so torn without Riley: both lost and alone, but also empowered as her immunity endowed her with a sense of purpose. Ellie was probably too naïve to know what love really was, but she cared about Riley. She imagined fighting by Riley's side as a Firefly, and imagined knotting her fingers in Riley's spongy hair as she kissed her wet lips. After losing Riley, romance and sex seemed trivial compared with the idea that her body might be able to fix the world.

But now that Ellie wasn't going to save the world—now that she was going to live her life after all—her empowering immunity had simply become a crippling poison in her blood that would keep her a few breaths away from everyone else. And Joel had done this to her.

Joel, by keeping her away from the Fireflies, had made her strength a weakness. He put her in a situation where physical intimacy was to be an important part of her life—an important part that she was never going to have. He put Ellie in a part of the world where she didn't belong.

Ellie crossed her arms in front of her tightly. She couldn't hate and love Joel at the same time. She needed to just hate him and try to get back to a place in time where her life was useful. She wished that he could have been a part of that with her, but he couldn't let her do what she needed to do.

She wondered if he and Tess had ever been as co-dependent as she and Joel were. They were obviously involved, but Tess seemed to have an identity independent of Joel. Then Ellie remembered overhearing Joel say that Tess brushed him off whenever he suggested settling down. _He must have been waiting to settle for a long time. He's been restless for too long_. Ellie wanted to sympathize, but she couldn't let go of that feeling that her life could still achieve something meaningful; there had to be more to her than 'settling down' to a life she could only half live.

Ellie figured that Joel didn't have much left to lose. He was probably going to be honest with her now he knew she was serious. When Joel was hesitant to begin talking, Ellie asked, 'What happened after we were caught in the water? I remember being sucked under.'

'Umm…' Joel scratched the back of his head. His words were slow, as if he had just woken up. 'You, uh… you were unconscious. I pulled you out and a Firefly found us.'

'They helped us?'

'No, uhh… You wouldn't, uh… And he knocked me out.' Joel rubbed his eyes. Ellie expected him to yawn next. 'Then,' he began. 'I woke up in the hospital. You weren't there. _Marlene_,' he said her name with distance, 'she said you were being prepped for surgery. She didn't think you were going to live through it.'

Ellie was suspicious, but Joel's emphasis on her not being by his side helped her to empathize. He must have been furious and scared.

'And then you killed her?'

'No. She left. I killed the guard she left with me. Then a lot of other people.'

His choice to say 'people' rather than something less humanizing, such as 'guys' or 'Fireflies' was refreshing.

'Did you kill Marlene?'

Joel swallowed. 'Yes.'

Ellie leant back against the shelter and let her hands fall into the wet dust by her side. She didn't feel the need to comfort Joel and tell him what she was feeling. She'd let him wait. Ellie, of course, had already guessed that he had killed Marlene. Knowing for sure, though, was a knife in her stomach. Ellie felt even more alone than she had before, and the night felt colder. Marlene was the last person alive who knew Ellie's mother. Being in touch with Marlene made Ellie feel somewhat closer to Anna, as though Marlene was a part of her origin story. And that gave her a home, however abstract.

And now that Marlene and her Fireflies were gone, did that mean that no one else was working on a cure? All of Ellie's planned washed away, mixed with the rainwater in the gutters. She wanted to go and sit in the dirty stream on the road so that her outsides reflected her insides. She needed to be as dirty as she felt.

Ellie asked Joel, 'Had they really been failing with other people who were immune?'

'I got that impression.'

'You got that impression,' Ellie mumbled to herself.

She was too tired and too dried out to cry. _Instead,_ Ellie thought, _I can let the rain be sad for me. I don't have enough emotions left to waste on Joel_.

Moving to her knees, Ellie looked straight ahead out at the rain. She stood up to walk those couple of steps, then stepped out from under the cover.

'What are you doing?' Joel asked.

Ellie sat down on the gutter and crossed her legs. The stream of cold rainwater soaked her jeans. She imagined that the rush tickling her leg hairs was all over her body, and again, she was falling off the back of the bus and into the white water. As the bus crashed deeper, it created a vacuum that sucked her down with it. She was thrown in a tornado of water until the dark figure above her encompassed her entire line of vision. There was pain. And then there was Joel, driving her toward Jackson.

She opened her eyes and Joel was sitting in the gutter next to her, looking at her with pouted lips and furrowed eyebrows.

'I didn't mean to hurt you,' he said. 'I know it's what you wanted. I know that.'

Ellie turned to him briefly. His brown eyes caught the light reflecting off the wet road. The silver flecks of his hair cut through the dark blue air.

'But I—', he stammered, 'I couldn't let them take your life. I couldn't let anyone take that away from you. Not for the good of Tess or Sam or your friend, or for the good of the whole damn world. You're meant to be who you are. You don't have to die for that.'

The green of his shirt was a slick black that clung to his arms as they shook. He held them in front of him, illustrating how he felt, touching the shoulder of an invisible Ellie who sat a foot closer to him.

His voice, like his arms, was unsteady. He breathed his words: 'I'm so sorry. I am so sorry, Ellie.'

The tone of his voice had changed. Without thinking, Ellie turned her body toward him. Joel pressed both of his palms to his forehead, as if wiping blood from his face.

'I did it for me,' he said. 'I couldn't have gone home without you. There was no home without you.'

Again, he hung his head and continued to shake away his memories. Instinctively, but still staying steady, Ellie placed her left hand on his right shoulder. He looked up at her with a sad smile, which quickly dropped.

'I can't do it,' he said. The rain had soaked his hair, but only sat on his beard. 'Not without you. I could once before, but I can't now.'

Ellie let her hands do what they wanted. She didn't know if she forgave Joel, but she could understand him. _Poor, flawed, wrong, selfish, ignorant, Joel_, she thought. Her body was so heavy. She needed to feel light again in Joel's strong arms. She needed to not think and do one thing that would make her happy before she was crushed under her own weight.

Gently, Ellie put her other hand on Joel's left cheek. Her palm moulded to his cheekbones. Joel kept his head down. Ellie used her other hand, the one on his shoulder, to lift his chin. He still wouldn't look at her. She increased the pressure in both her hands: not enough to hurt him, but enough to make sure he kept still. She leaned in and put her lips on his.

Some sharp strands of beard caught between their lips, but maybe that was how it was meant to be: rough, sharp threads keeping her from experiencing his wet, doughy lips. As she kissed him, her body followed the direction of her body, and soon, she was on her knees, inching her hips closer to his stomach. When her hands moved to the sides of Joel's head and gripped his dripping hair, her fingers dug and found dry patches underneath. She kept her fingers warm here. She re-pursed her lips to push herself onto him harder. Her nipples tingled. She wanted Joel to take them in his mouth. Thinking about taking off her shirt, Ellie realised that she hadn't been paying attention to Joel at all.

His hands hovered over her hips, slowly moving over her jeans, occasionally brushing the bare skin between her jeans and her shirt when she moved around. When his fingers finally held her hips, Ellie's back shivered.

He still hadn't opened his mouth for her, though. She kissed him lighter than she had been and parted her lips for him, licking her own so that he could feel her tongue. Joel didn't respond.

When she leaned away from Joel, he wouldn't look her in the eyes.

'I thought this was what you wanted,' Ellie said. She tried to be cruel and seductive, because that's how she felt, but her voice was too breathy, too unsure. 'All of me? Here, for you, only you.'

'This isn't right. No. Ellie…' he talked to himself. 'You're fifteen.'

'Do you really think I'm too young to know what I want?'

Joel's face softened but he still wouldn't look at her. Although he wasn't speaking, the subtle changes in his facial expressions showed that she was still talking to himself.

Ellie continued, 'You've been waiting for this. When your thumb rubs my hand you're thinking about rubbing something else. You take your shirt off when we bathe so I can look at you, even though you can't look at me.'

Joel looked ashamed, so Ellie changed direction: 'You make me crazy so that as soon as I'm alone I have to do something about it.' His face lit up for a second. 'I have to run a wet finger up and down…'

'Your friends are coming,' he said, as if giving her time to readjust herself and not be embarrassed for kissing him.

'So?' she asked. She turned and saw torchlight beaming from around the bend.

She stood and pulled on his forearm, gesturing for him to stand up. He followed her to an open window at the end of the street. She quickly explained that the room was clear and that she'd been meaning to finish searching the second floor. The others didn't know about it.

They climbed through and stumbled on the carpet inside. It was dark; the moonlight didn't reach them here. Before Ellie could regain her balance, Joel grabbed and spun her around. One of his arms crashed her waist to him and the other cupped the back of her head. His mouth met hers quickly and his lips guided hers open. His tongue rubbed over the tip of hers before moving deeper and faster. Ellie fought with him, holding his head in hers and pushing her mouth harder onto his, but it just gave him more momentum as he shifted his arms even closer to her, so his shoulders almost sat under hers. He used the pressure of his arms under hers to lift her onto her toes, while both his hands squeezed her ass. Both of them forgot to breathe.

'What changed your mind?' Ellie gasped.

'I didn't,' he grumbled against her neck. His lips moved up her jawline and onto her temple. 'I didn't know you wanted me.'

Ellie felt her vagina ache, as though it were contracting each time her clit brushed the crutch of Joel's jeans. His hard bulge dug into bladder. _Fuck_. She needed to be taller. Ellie didn't know how to move next. Her nipples threw electric shocks all over her body, but she needed to angle her clit onto Joel's bulge. Her thoughts were cut short as Joel pulled the neck of grey shirt down and kissed the soft flesh above her breast. A delayed moan escaped Ellie's throat. As his lips moved around her clavicle, one of Joel's hands groped her right breast, squishing it so that she could feel her cleavage rise out of her bra.

'Joel…' she whimpered.

He began to fall to his knees but held Ellie so that she would follow without hitting the ground too hard. His face was so warm on hers. She felt safe and light. The two of them alone together was so natural. They were both on their knees, grabbing whatever they could from each other. Ellie moved her hands over his back, memorizing the grooves of muscles that she'd been waiting for so long to touch. She remembered wading in a lake with Joel that spring. He stood in the water waist-deep and shirtless, so that Ellie could imagine that he was completely naked. He had modestly faced away from her, but his wide, ripped shoulders, and his small, tight waist drove her crazy. She wanted to get her hands under his shirt so she could feel his scars.

'I've wanted you for so long,' Joel growled as he began to lift his shirt over his head.

Ellie realised what he was readying them for.

'No, Joel!'

Ellie jumped back and her butt thudded on the carpet.

'What?' he asked. He froze with his shirt held up around his chest.

'I'm not going to fuck you!'

'Oh…' Joel looked to the side of the room in thought. Then he dropped his head and pulled his shirt back down. He sat down and bent his knees; he blinked at his knees hard. 'I didn't… I'm sorry…' His breathing was so loud it filled the room.

Ellie, still sitting on the ground, shuffled further away from him. There wasn't a safe place in the room to look. She didn't know if she Joel was an idiot or suicidal.

'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have even done anything.' He pulled his legs up to his chest, laid his forehead on his knees, and hung his arms over his head, keeping himself locked up in his own Pandora's box.

Ellie wasn't sure if they should head back to the group or not. Either way, she needed Joel to do something. He'd been so passive since she saw him again, and she was worried that he was slipping back into apathy.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I shouldn't have kissed you. That was dangerous…' as the words came out of Ellie's mouth she saw how true they were. She hadn't been thinking clearly before because she was so mad at him. It almost seemed right that he should take the risk of kissing her, him being the one who left her alive and weak. _Oh my god. I could have just killed Joel._

'I—I'm really sorry. Shit. Fuck. Are you okay?'

'Am _I_ okay?' Joel looked up.

'I'm so sorry, Joel. Oh my god. If anything happened to you…' Ellie felt dizzy. She shuffled further away from Joel, thinking that she could somehow un-infect him by creating distance. She couldn't help it. She imagined Joel turning. Shaking. Whimpering.

As Riley began to turn, she had said that she could feel her nerves dulling, but she couldn't keep herself from twitching, as though the wind were knocked out of her. When Riley had finally lost control, Ellie mistook her moans for crying and went to hold her. Then Riley threw Ellie onto the floor. And Ellie stuck her knife into Riley's cheek. And her mouth. And her neck.

_If Joel turned_… Ellie couldn't breathe. Despite the chills all over her body, she was sweating. Both of her palms hit the floor as Ellie realized she was falling forward. A hand gripped each of her arms and pulled her up.

'Ellie! Ellie, look at me,' Joel urged.

'Stay away from me!' Ellie pushed his chest to hurl herself further back.

Joel held his hands in front of him, surrendering. 'I'm sorry. Tell me what to do.'

The wrinkles on Joel's forehead were more pronounced as concern dominated his face.

'Just stay back. Don't get infected.'

'What? Infected? Why would I—_oh, baby_.'

Joel reached for Ellie and pulled her up to him. He held her head against his chest and curled his other arm around her back.

'Don't,' Ellie said. She tried to wriggle away, but she was so tired and Joel was so strong. The water in Joel's shirt mixed with the water in her hair.

'It's okay, baby girl. I'm not going to get infected. I'm fine.' His hand rubbed her spine. When she didn't respond, he kept going: 'We've shared food and water before. If I was gonna get sick, I probably would've by now.'

'I'm so sorry, Joel. I don't know why I did that to you. I love you. Fuck. What's wrong with me?'

Joel stiffened around Ellie and his hands stopped moving.

'You love me?' he asked.

Ellie retraced her thoughts. As she re-heard what she said she tightened too. Slowly, she placed a hand on Joel's chest and lifted her chin so he could hear her better.

'Of course I do,' she said nervously. Then more bitterly, she said, 'Why else would I hate you so much?' She looked up even though she knew that she wouldn't be able to see his face. She, instead, rested her eyes on Joel's arm, watching the bulge twitch under his wet shirt as he tightened his grip.

Joel hugged her closer. 'I love you too,' he said.

'I know.'

They both trembled lightly in each other's arms. Although they both stayed on their knees, Ellie had slumped onto his chest. Joel stayed straight and hard, supporting her weight, keeping her light.

'Should we go back?' Joel offered.

Ellie could feel the cold now that the adrenaline had left her body.

'Not yet.'

Ellie lay on the floor with her knees still bent, forming a 'Z' on the ground. Joel mirrored her. They lay just as they had in the radio tower, before Joel had closed up again. Gingerly, she swept her hand up Joel's bicep, over his shoulders, and up to his cheek, tracing his silhouette. For a long time, they closed their eyes without sleeping, just appreciating each other's touch, trying desperately to move back in time.


	3. Beautiful Things

**A/N: Thank-you to everyone who has commented, followed, and favo(u)rited. This story isn't perfect but it has been a lot of fun to write. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate your comments. **

**This chapter is a lemon. Or rather, it's lemon-y and hot. Like hot water and lemon.**

**There we go. **

**This chapter is lemon tea. **

Joel woke up before sunrise. He pulled a sheet of newspaper off his cheek and checked on Ellie, who was sleeping a few yards away from him. Her short hair had a light frizz from the rain. Joel's brown jacket was draped over her waist. Karla and Thomas were huddled together in the back corner, and Ethan lay on his own, his back against the wall and a machete touching his fingers. A dim, grey light made its way through the dry clouds so that Joel could creep to the door without stepping on anything. Before he closed the door behind him, he saw Ellie's eyes open under her still-damp fringe.

'I'll be back,' he whispered across the room, then closed the door behind him.

The air was sticky, but the chill was refreshing. Joel pressed his cold hands to his neck to try and wake up. The muscles of his back were tender, and they winced each time his bones put any pressure on them. There was a fist-sized bump blooming on the back of his skull. A back tooth was looser.

He walked through shallow puddles and studied his surroundings. Everything was still. Not even the birds were awake. He walked through the flat streets and looked for something to hunt, but there weren't any bodies of water in view and the foliage only peppered the yards. There were mushrooms and red berries in certain corners, but Joel was sure that if they didn't kill him, they'd at least make him sick. And he had to be strong. _For Ellie._

The night before, raindrops had covered her soft, naked neck. Strands of her uncropped fringe had tickled her lips, which were dark pink with windburn. He memorized how they moved._ Goddam, she's beautiful_, he thought to himself, trying to remember the last time he used that word.

Joel had never called Tess beautiful, though she was in her own way. Giving Tess compliments almost felt like an insult, as if she needed them, as if she weren't stronger without them. Instead, Tess smirked when he told her what she did to him: she was more interested in results than qualities. _You got me achin' for ya, Boss_, he had said against her temple as he pinned her against the peeling wallpaper with his hips. Her hot breath could leave a damp circle on his cheek. _I can feel that_, she had said. She opened for him and arched her pelvis against the top of his thigh. Once he unbuttoned her shirt and her sucked on her breasts, she was halfway there. He'd pull her jeans down, unbuckle his belt, and wrap her legs around his waist, then fuck her against the wall just like that, with her tit in his mouth, until he felt her fluid trickle down his balls.

A couple of one-night stands flickered past as he thought back to his first years in Boston. One woman, whose dark, bushy hair caught twigs in the wind, had confessed that her youngest son recently died without his medication. Because he couldn't express his empathy, he licked her cunt. Another girl—a curvy, blonde teenager—begged him to fuck her before her first shift as a solider. Alex, her name was. Nineteen. They came together in Joel's bed. He never saw her again. That wasn't long before Joel gave up on the system and started looking for trouble—looking for ways out of the walls.

Then it hit him: the last time he used that word, _beautiful_. Tommy had just announced that he was joining the Fireflies. Joel had cracked a knuckle having missed Tommy's face and punched a desk. Marlene drew her pistol and told Joel to get the fuck out before he lost the Fireflies' last scrap of sympathy. _You make a beautiful couple_, Joel had said sarcastically before he backed out of the apartment that he and Tommy shared.

Water had crept under the masking tape that held Joel's sneakers together, Joel remembered. The pond had appeared in the cracked square after a particularly loud shout of rain and the Q.Z. flooded. Joel paced through the square, through the pond, wishing he knew where to find a drink. Other people and soldiers peppered the roads around him, borrowing the fresh sunshine, but Joel kept pacing, muttering to himself, thinking of all the reasons why Tommy was an idiot.

_There's nothin left savin'. Not for me_, Joel thought. Yes, he admitted that he wanted his world back, but not in the same way Tommy did. Joel wanted Sarah back; he couldn't give a shit about television or highways or voting. When someone reminisced about steak, Joel cooed along for fun, but he dreamed about other things. Blonde things. Grey-eyed things. Mud-covered things in striped socks, who played his guitar like a drum and who sprayed cream on their cereal when he slept through breakfast. He dreamed of Sarah's damn near-perfect report card and of her chance of being the first person from his side of the family to finish high school. _Sure, we can go on_, Joel had said to Tommy in his head. _But hot water ain't gonna make it any easier. Ration cards ain't gonna stop the nightmares_. _But go on, be a Firefly. Be a plain-clothed soldier. Fight for freedom. Shoot a few kids on the way. _

When Joel finally stopped moving, he saw a flash of color in the cup of a traffic light. He was sure the light told him to slow down, even though the lights didn't work. He walked back onto the road so that he was facing the box, which sat high above his head. There were sticks covering the center globe. A nest. An orange wing lifted into view, then lowered again. Unthinkingly, he titled his head back, uncharacteristically curious toward the vibrant feathers in the cracked structure. A small orange bird with a black head—a robin or an oriole or something like that—jumped onto the edge of the nest. _How 'bout that_, he had thought. _That nest wouldn't last long if the city still ran the roads. Someone from Council would scoop it up, and probably separate the babies from their mother in the process. They'd die without her. _There, Joel decided that there was beauty in the monstrous world, beauty that would never have lived, that couldn't survive in the world Tommy fought for. And now, he knew, one of those beautiful things was Ellie.

As he memorized girlish beauty of Ellie's bare neck and rosy lips, as they sat in the gutter in the middle of a brewing storm, Joel had thought that she would not only try to leave him again, but also, genuinely hate him. To save himself, he rambled pathetically. He wasn't quite sure what he was saying, but he was thinking that she was the only beautiful thing in his life. The only thing keeping human.

He knew that he shouldn't have kissed her, but at the time, it didn't seem like a kiss, but more like he was tasting her or talking without speaking. He wasn't stroking her hips; he was exploring her shape. He wasn't rubbing her breasts; he was… Joel's penis twitched at the memory. _What the fuck is wrong with you? She's a child_, he reminded himself. _But mature and strong. A fighter. Tender. Sweet… _Every move he had made last night was a physical expression of how he felt and thought. He only wanted to be as physically close to her as they once were in other ways. Any gap between their flesh was a chance that she would leave again. _Look for the light, _he mused. _She's the light. _

When he'd first opened his eyes, after he'd thrown himself off the bridge, he thought that Ellie had come back, that she needed him again. Maybe their trek wasn't supposed to bring Ellie to the fireflies, but to him. Now that he was sober from the pain and confusion, he realized that it was dumb luck that Ellie hadn't made it too far away from Tommy's. Either way, he wasn't letting her go again.

Obviously, Ellie was doing better alone than Joel was, though he wasn't sure what her plans were. _Pick up wanderers? Stumble across the country looking for Fireflies?_ He couldn't understand where her mind was leading her. _It'll lead me to hell_.

Joel remembered the shame on her face as they strolled back to camp last night.

_We can't… It's never going to happen_, Ellie had said. _Not for us. Not for me_.

She had sat cross-legged in front of him. The moonlight was trapped in the tears on her chin.

_That's not what I want_, Joel said from the floor in front of her. _I just want you, exactly as you are. The rest don't matter. _He corrected: _Not if it means you runnin' off again. _

_How do you want me, Joel? _she asked in a harsher tone. He knew what she was referring to.

_Whatever way I can_, he admitted. It sounded disgusting as it rolled off his lip. He had to turn away. For a moment he saw himself as old man in front of a young girl. _I mean… whatever you want… _He couldn't make the words fit. How could he tell her that he loved her as a guardian and a friend but wanted her body against his? How could he be close to her and be her lover without taking advantage of her—without ruining her life? How could he protect her from himself? He couldn't. And then he realised that the only reason why Ellie had kissed him in the first place was because she didn't care enough about him to risk ruining their friendship—relationship—whatever it was that remained. It was already ruined. _If you come back to Tommy's, _Joel said, _I'll leave you alone. I promise. I'll always be here for you, but I won't… I won't push you… I won't do anything to you. You have my word, baby girl. I shouldn't have—_

_—__Okay_, Ellie had said. She didn't sound satisfied, but she was firm. _We'll pretend this didn't happen. I'll go to your brother's. _Her spark had drowned in the rain.

Joel wasn't upset by their resolution. She'd be nearby. Maybe one day they could rebuild. He could teach her to swim and play the guitar, and maybe one day she'd like him enough. _She must be humiliated right now_, Joel guessed. _Best give her some space. _

After the sky turned pink with sunrise, Joel crept through a colonial house with a caved-in roof. He guessed that not many others would risk going scavenging through the place. Inside, he found two cans of tinned spaghetti, and he headed back to Ellie.

He opened the door gently, though it creaked, and he held his hands out as he entered. Everyone but Thomas was awake and they jumped at Joel's presence.

'It's okay,' Joel said with a smile. 'I caught breakfast.' He crouched and unpacked the two tins.

'It's amazing anything's left,' Karla said. She seemed more confident around him than she did yesterday. In the light, the purple smudges under her eyes and a deep scar across her chest punctuated her paleness.

'Good going, Joel,' Ellie said. He intentionally didn't look at her.

Joel cut off the tops with a shiv. 'You should know,' he began, still squatting over his backpack, 'Ellie and I know where you're going.' Ethan and Karla froze. Joel tipped his head forward in a gesture of goodwill. 'It's okay. We get it. I know the people who run the compound. We can get you there.' The two visibly relaxed as he spoke. 'But I can't promise what will happen. I'll let 'em know you're decent people.'

'What's the plan?' Ethan asked. He folded his arms and moved forward.

'Maybe we should check this area out better. Then we'll meet back here and get going. I'll take the keys if that's okay.'

Nobody objected so they shared their spaghetti. Thomas sat by Karla and stared at Joel.

'How you doin'?' Joel asked. Thomas smiled. Karla tousled his hair.

_Creepy kid._

When the group split up Joel didn't mean for Ellie to follow him. He walked a few steps ahead of her and pretended to study the street, but her presence was making him nervous: especially when they passed the bus stop. He adjusted the revolver on his belt.

'Do you want your rifle?' she offered.

'This'll do me,' he said.

'Do you want to check these houses on the left? There are some rooms I haven't been through yet.' She sounded perkier than she did earlier.

'How 'bout we split up?'

'Is there somewhere else you want to go first?'

'We'll get through this faster if you check on your own.' Joel turned to her. Her eyes had turned a paler shade of green. 'It seems safe enough out here.' He rolled his sleeves to his elbows.

'Where are you going to be?' Her cheeks flushed, making her freckles stand out, and hair still frizzed in the front. His hand stuttered as he thought about combing her hair back with his fingers.

'Around. Might check cars for gas.' Her dark lashes flickered against her stray fringe. _I wonder what her hair would look like after a long night together… All in tufts at the back… stuck to her sweat at the front…_ 'I won't be long,' he said, already turning away.

'Okay.'

'Alright.'

Joel crossed the street and headed down a dead-end. He trudged through overgrown weeds, which pushed through clumps of concrete that once made up a driveway. He found a bucket, cut up a hose, and siphoned a little gas, though it seemed watery. Once he had half a bucket, he headed back to the car and filled her up. No one had returned yet. The clouds had cleared and birds of prey circled high up. His jeans were almost dry. Out of habit, he looked at his cracked watch. _Ellie should be back_.

Joel jogged up to where he'd left her and checked the surrounding houses. 'Ellie!' he called, but not too loudly. She'd only hear him if he were very close. Joel jumped through the broken window of the only two-storey house on the street. Ellie's backpack was on the kitchen bench. Then he heard her voice, distantly, like she was talking to someone upstairs. He began climbing the carpeted stairs but stopped halfway. He heard her make short moans, which were gentle, but deep. _What the hell? _He kept his back against the wall. She made a frustrated grunt and something dropped against the floor. Then he heard a disappointed sigh.

'Motherfucker…' he heard her say sadly. He almost laughed at her tone.

He began walking up to her again when he heard his name. 'Joel,' Ellie said. He would've thought that she was calling him if she hadn't said it so softly. 'Joel,' he heard again, and his eyes rolled back for a second during a slow blink. He wanted to hear her say his name into his neck. _Joel, just like that, Joel_. Although he wasn't sure what was happening with Ellie, he was sure that he shouldn't be there since he was growing hard.

'Ellie,' he announced himself.

He stomped so that Ellie could hear him coming. The door to the room she was in was open, so he waited in the hallway.

'Ellie, I was looking for ya. I'm out here.'

'Joel?' Her voice was definitely more alert now. He heard her walk up to the doorframe. She poked her head out and stood in front of him.

'Hey,' she said. Her face was smooth and her clothes were in position. Instead of explaining, her mouth twitched and she grinned awkwardly.

'Is everything right? Your backpack's downstairs.'

'Yeah…' She scratched the back of her head. 'I was reading.'

'Ready to go?'

'Sure.'

She moved around Joel, and as he held his hand out, she jerked back.

_Jesus, calm down, kid. I wasn't gonna grab ya. _

'You're not bringing your book?' he reminded.

'Right,' she said, looking to her untied shoelace. She turned back into the room. After Joel had folded his arms, she returned with three thick books held to her chest.

'This is the part where you ask me what I was doing,' Ellie said.

'You were reading.'

'No I wasn't. Not _then_.'

'Ellie, I don't give a damn. Keep moving.'

Joel turned but she stepped in front and faced him. He considered walking around her, but her stare turned him to concrete.

'Do you know how alone I am?' She spoke as though she were explaining herself.

_And this is my fault? _'I never left you,' Joel accused.

'You fucked up everything, Joel. You fucked up _everything_. You should be nothing to me, but we're so in sync, and that's confusing, and my life sucks in every other way. It's like I've lost my mind,' she continued in a mock-masculine voice, 'and you can carry on being Joel.'

'You don't think I'm goin' crazy?'

'Not like I am.'

He wasn't sure why they were mad with each other.

'Well maybe you think this is unique to you, but I got news for you. When someone is your friend, and you want to be close to them, and you want to clutch them to you as hard as you can, things get confusing.' He could feel himself saying 'fuck' between each word, but instead, each syllable was a punch. 'You're supposed to have crushes; that's normal—'

'I don't _just_ have crushes, Joel. I _loved_ Riley. I know how I feel.'

Joel felt something in his stomach and something in his head jerk simultaneously. In another world, a bucket of cold water was dumped over his head. He didn't know Ellie had a boyfriend—a girlfriend—before. She wasn't as inexperienced with _love_ and everything that came with it as he thought. Quickly, his brain processed Ellie's implication that she might _love_ him too. Regardless, he pushed through his speech. '_That's normal_, but _I _am older; _I_ have a responsibility to you, which is bigger than whatever _this_,' his hand waved between them, 'is.'

Ellie made a frustrated sound and began to pace away from him.

'Don't walk away when I'm talkin' to you.' He followed her.

'Holy shit. Joel cares what I think,' Ellie said as she kept walking away.

As he chased her down the stairs, he created images of Ellie with a girl her age. The other girl had mousey brown hair and Ellie's freckled. This other girl, Riley, kissed Ellie's cheeks one at a time. Where he expected to become horny, a surge of gravel ripped through his shoulders, beckoning him to break something. If this girl were here, he'd tell her not to treat someone so soft and impressionable like a disposable toy. _Keep the hell away from her_, he thought to himself. _At_ himself.

_God-fuckin-dammit!_

Ellie swiped her backpack as she passed the kitchen bench. She muttered, 'I don't need these,' and left her books on the bench.

Joel grabbed her arm and pulled her so that she was facing him. Her mouth and eyes opened wide in a blend of horror and disgust. Joel dropped her arm, but she had already started warning, 'Don't fucking touch me!'

'I'm not! Goddammit, are we gonna keep chasing each other? Is this our life now, huh?' Joel couldn't keep himself from yelling. 'Why are we fightin?!'

'Because it's all we can do!' Ellie yelled back. The double meaning of her words left them both breathless. The anger quickly faded, though the tension remained. 'Isn't it?' she asked. Her lips became small and pouty and her eye lashes glistened.

'Ellie…' Joel trailed off.

'Yeah?'

He shrugged. 'I don't know.' Looking at her untied shoelace, Joel reached out for her hand and brought it into his. Each of his rough fingers clasped around the tiny hand. 'Look at that,' he said.

Ellie looked at their hands, not impressed. 'What?'

'Just thinkin' 'bout how beautiful that is.'

Ellie's frown melted into gentle neutrality and her eyebrows rested over her eyes.

She rarely saw him unguarded, without sarcasm and blunt authority. But the way his hands played with hers made him younger. Even his anger, she now realized, was his weakness, not his strength. Despite his willingness to guide them, he was just as lost as her.

Earlier, before she had heard his voice in the hallway, Ellie had tried quench her need for him, still lingering from the night before. The pirate in her romance novel quickly became grey-haired and plaid-shirted. As the hero lifted his lady's skirt, Ellie walked her fingers into her jeans without unzipping them. She slid her wetness up to her clit and began to tease herself, but she couldn't relax.

Now, though, Joel's light strokes across her palm sent feathery chills up her arms and down her spine. She meant to pull her hand away, but she forgot her purpose. She figured that as long as she wasn't moving, she was still winning this fight.

Joel bent over while he lifted her hand and left dry kisses on her wrist. His mouth moved over her fingers and he kissed them gently too. Shivers travelled through Ellie's chest and stomach and forked down her thighs and along her crotch.

'Touch me, Joel,' a voice said. She felt hypnotized, and again, tired, but this time she didn't want to take control. She wanted to be _loved_.

Without lifting his head or looking at her, Joel moved his kisses up her arm, which were becoming wetter, as if he were organically following his own train of thought, as though Ellie hadn't said anything. He rolled up her sleeve as he went, and Ellie was grateful that he had the arm that wasn't scarred. As he opened his mouth around the inside of her elbow and sucked, one of his thick arms reached for her waist and pulled her a step closer. Ellie moved her hips toward his, so Joel lowered her arm and took her face in both his hands. Dry pinches of skin scratched her sensitive cheek, but the tips of his fingers in her hair sent warm spells over her scalp. Dust drifted around his worn face and his brown eyes, which searched for an answer for what they were supposed to do.

Ellie needed to touch him and please him as though she were touching herself. Her hands ironed over his broad chest and teased the thin black hair creeping out from under his collar. The top button of his shirt clinked against her nail as she undid it, and Joel made a stifled moan as his hands dropped to her shoulders. She liked the weight of his arms pressing there, so she undid the next button, and admired his messy torso and twisted groan. He gave her uneven, grateful smile and gripped her shoulders. Instinctively, she moved into his hands and arched her back; she never had a massage before. Joel chuckled.

'You're mighty cute when you sigh like that,' he said.

'Yeah? You think they could make dolls to look like me?' she joked.

'Ahh…' Joel laughed.

'What?'

'Well I'm sure there's a doll somewhere that looks like you.' His shoulders shook but he blushed and shook his head.

'What?!'

'I'll explain later,' he said, then embraced her neck with wet lips. It tickled, so she scrunched her neck to her shoulder as a reflex, but once Joel's tongue warmed her skin, her shoulder rolled away and she moaned. Almost immediately she felt warm liquid leak around her labia.

'Oh, god… How are you so good at that?' Her hands wrapped around his chest and gripped his back.

'I'm not,' he murmured into her neck. 'I'm just listening to you.' He nibbled down her jugular and pulled the neck of shirt back so he could taste her shoulder. His hair, fluffed from the rain, brushed her face. His hair smelled of grass and his odor almost smelled like wet-dog, but it comforted her. She remembered being snuggled up to him the night they spent in the radio tower and how she wanted to rub his smell all over her.

'I didn't… I didn't say anything,' Ellie said.

'You flinched,' he said in between bites on her shoulder, 'so I kissed harder.'

He ran his tongue over the inside of her ear slowly and Ellie's whole body trembled. _Since when were ears sexy_?

'Right now,' he said in his deepest voice, 'your hip's grazin' my thigh.' Ellie glanced down. She hadn't realised that she was struggling to push their bodies together. 'So,' Joel continued, 'I know you want me to do this.' Suddenly both his hands grabbed her ass and pulled her against him. The hard bulge in his pants pressed into her bladder.

'Shit, this isn't working,' Ellie said impatiently. 'I'm too fucking short.' She looked down at where their jeans met and bit her bottom lip.

'I gotcha,' he said as he slipped off the red shirt that hung over her long sleeves. Together, they pulled her cotton top over her head. Feeling the cool air on her breasts for the first time in days, Ellie hoped that Joel would put his hands over her black bra to cover her. Rather, he shifted his weight back and his mouth dropped open slightly.

'Ellie,' he said though his breathing. 'Well…'

Ellie's face and chest heated. 'What?' He was either going to say something really nice or reject her.

'Well, you're bigger under that shirt than I thought.' His face stayed fixed in concern and shock. Ellie's jaw clenched together. _What did that mean?_

Joel snapped into a hearty laugh and his eyes crinkled.

'Fuck you!' Ellie pushed his chest then folded her arms to cover herself.

'Just messin' with ya. Figure you deserve a little somethin' back.'

He grasped her forearms and dragged them to her sides. A massive smile stayed spread across his face and bared his off-white, perfectly straight teeth. _Why is he so happy all of the sudden? _Again, he brought his hands to Ellie's face, but this time, he ran his palms over the top of her head and flattened her hair down. His eyes scanned her hair as he groomed her. She felt like she was being pet.

_He really looks happy_. As she giggled at his motherwork, she noticed that she had slipped out of her dream-like apathy too. Here she was, with Joel, as if they were joking on the road, except she was shirtless, inches from his hard chest, and they knew almost everything about each other.

The pulses between her legs pumped harder.

'Remember what I said before?' she asked.

Joel tipped his head to the side and tightened his eyebrows.

Her rush of affection and need for him made her self-conscious. She enclosed her hand around the scar on her right arm. 'Touch me.'

Joel's face smoothed and he stared at her with attention, as though he were trying to make out the atoms in her lips. One hand cupped her face while the other brushed her lips.

'Will you lie down with me?' he asked.

Ellie gulped, but trusted that he guessed her intentions. 'There's a bed upstairs.'

He let her take his hand and lead him to the stairs. Ellie shook a little as she looked ahead. This would be the first time she'd be _close_ to him, or to anyone, without being drunk on fear or anger. At once she was scared of Joel's size and strength, but excited by his experience. _He'll look after me_. By the light but steady way he held her hand, she could guess that he cared about her.

They reached the doorframe of the room Ellie was in earlier, and she dropped Joel's hand. She twisted around to check his expression, and his tight eyes burned. She climbed onto the double bed whose fitted sheet was relatively spotless, since the windows up here hadn't been smashed. Although the sheet was dusty, it was cleaner than the floor downstairs. Ellie leaned back on her arms and lay her legs out straight in front of her. She crossed her ankles. Joel waited in the doorway. He was framed by the mocha bookshelves on either side of the door.

'Room for me?' He leant against the door in what Ellie guessed was meant to be coy, but his open shirt, mussed hair, and flexed shoulders made her uncross her ankles and bring her thighs up gently. She parted her feet but her knees met in front of her chest.

Ellie exaggeratedly looked around the bed. 'Umm. Nope. Nope. Nope. Yes, we have room for one more.' She tried to smile but she was too nervous. Joel didn't laugh at her joke but strode to the edge of the bed and crawled up to her. Ellie was dizzy. He kissed her lips lightly for a second, giving Ellie a chance to control the pace, and then he was pushing her back onto the bed. His torso shadowed her, but his legs lay on the mattress at her side. His tongue opened her mouth and rubbed her tongue. He let her into his mouth so Ellie could explore him. He tasted of the tomato sauce in the spaghetti they ate earlier. Her tongue couldn't get deep enough so she held onto the back of his head and kissed him harder. When he broke away to breathe, he chuckled lightly. The seam of his shirt hung under Ellie's face and she could see his chest hair dip into his dense stomach. Wanting to kiss his scar, she began unbuttoning the rest of his shirt, and Joel hovered steadily above her as she did.

'Fuck,' Ellie sighed as she ran her hands over his chest and stomach hair and his almost-purple nipples. Fiddling with his collar, she pushed his collar over his shoulders so that his shirt hung off his elbows. Joel sat on his knees and pulled it off his muscular arms.

Ellie bolted up onto her knees and kissed him hard and fast. She tiled her head to the side to let him in deeper and he ran his tongue over hers, trying to get as close as possible, trying to fill each other with their own spit. His arms clutched her back and ass to him, and Ellie felt his soft chest hair against her bare stomach.

'Don't get me too worked up,' he said as he moved his mouth to her neck. Electric tentacles tingled her nipples and stomach, and her clit twitched. 'I can't do much about this,' he said looking down at his bulge. Joel began licking the tops of Ellie's breasts in his own frenzy while she massaged the back of his neck, not letting him move away. His chin pulled back the left cup of her down he took her nipple into his mouth. The breast, which was barely more than a handful in Ellie's petite hands, half-disappeared under Joel's spiky lips. He sucked on the flesh around it then flicked her nipple with the tip of his tongue, gradually moving faster. Again, Ellie tried to grind her clit into Joel's jeans, but she moaned in failure.

'Take off your bra,' he said hurriedly as he unbuttoned her jeans and pulled the zipper down. As Ellie's black cotton underwear appeared between the 'V' of her zip, Ellie pulled the training/sports bra over her head. Joel's hands around her vagina drove her wild and she leant back on one of her arms while the other hung her weight on his shoulder.

Fairly roughly, Joel pushed Ellie flat on her back and pulled off her sneakers and socks. She lifted her hips as he edged off her jeans. Ellie lay in front of him, naked except for her underwear. The pattern of her ribs pressed through her skin as she sucked her stomach in. Her nipples were small and tight.

'What are we doing, Joel?'

'We're havin' each other,' he said as he cautiously moved closer, his chest rising and falling. 'Closin' the gap.'

'But… what's going to happen now?'

'Just relax, Ellie.' He sighed. 'I'm not going to take us any further than this.'

'Okay…'

He nibbled on her bottom lip until she lay down and parted her mouth. Her spine turned to jelly as she enjoyed being selfish and let Joel feed himself to her. Their chests inched together as Joel lowered onto her and rested his hips between her thighs. Because his hips were as wide as hers, she had lay higher on the bed and lift her legs up slightly so that he fit within her limbs. His stomach chafed her slit and Ellie pulled tufts of his hair as she rolled her hips.

'Did you ever think about me? When we were travellin'?' he asked between planting kisses on the bone between her breasts.

'Yes,' she groaned unselfconsciously.

'What'd you think about?'

'You… Holding me… Kissing me…' she said. He sucked on her nipple. 'Teaching me how to swim.'

Joel hummed through a giggle and pulled her underwear to the side, running a finger along her wetness. 'Ah, Jesus, you're wet.'

She gasped and pulled his hand away, even though her instinct was to open her thighs wider. _Everything is so gross down there. He doesn't have to do that. _Joel moved his hands and kneaded her ass instead.

'Did you ever think about me?' she asked.

'Uhh… not really,' he said onto the side of her boob. He added, 'But I wanted to.' He kissed the breast tissue under arm. 'I tried not to. Kind of impossible not to, though.'

She hoped he didn't make him feel guilty. Then, he wrapped his arms under her and rolled over, so that she was sitting on top of him while he lay flat on his back.

Her small breasts bounced over Joel's chest, and her legs opened so that she could rub herself against his crotch. Joel closed his eyes and grimaced as she grinded against him. He threw his head back and bit his fist.

'Ah…' Ellie gently moaned, too excited by his actual being there with her. She bowed to gently lick his scar, and Joel winced and the thin squishy layer of flesh over his hard muscles tensed.

'The nerves… I'm still healin',' he said.

She kissed his ribs and made her way up his nipple where she mimicked how he had been licking and sucking her.

'Goddam, Ellie.'

Seeing his eyes scrunch and mouth fall open while his grabbed a handful of hair on the back of her head made her feel wild and dirty and dangerous. She began quickly unbuckling his belt but as she became stuck trying to pull the buckle through the loop of his jeans, Joel grabbed her wrists.

'Might be a bit early for that yet,' he said firmly. He didn't let go of her wrists until the muscles in her arms relaxed, telling him she wasn't going to try again. Each breast swelled under his deep brown eyes.

Without breaking eye contact, she dropped her weight onto her arms on either side of him, and began moving her slit over the bulge in his jeans. Her mouth didn't quite close as she breathed through the shudders quaking from her between her legs.

'Are you…? Ha.' Joel smiled and chuckled in sweet disbelief. He looked at her like she was the most curious thing in the world. 'You wanna come for me, baby?' Joel said more than asked for her benefit.

Ellie guessed that this play wasn't doing much for him other than frustrating him even more than he already was. Maybe if he were younger, this could get him somewhere, if the mere touch of the person he adored could build an orgasm, like Joel did for Ellie, whose body became a knot of live wires in his presence. Ellie lifted her hips and brushed her clit lightly against his jeans, teasing herself. She waited for the electricity to send vibrations down her thighs, then she pushed herself into him hard and slow. Often, she would push her opening in to him, imagining that he was entering her. Again, Joel let out a breath of gravel, but Ellie knew that he was being driven mad having her masturbate against his body.

'I wish you could fuck me,' she said apologetically.

'I am, baby. I am,' he said, trying to help her fantasize.

'This isn't enough,' she said breathlessly, hoping that Joel didn't misunderstand.

'I know. But you need this. Stay with me.'

Ellie lay herself over Joel's chest. Her fingers played with his black chest hair and she delicately licked his nipple, all the while rubbing her clit against him. Joel made a throaty moan. He strained his neck so that his mouth reached hers. He squeezed the short hair at the back of her head as he kissed her roughly. Ellie's whole body shivered as his tongue searched her mouth. Her nipples and her clit were sizzling.

'Joel…'

She pulled away from him and placed both palms flat on his chest so that she had more control in the way she bucked against him. Joel dropped his head on the mattress and rubber her breasts and pinched her nipples. Ellie closed her eyes and imagined his dick disappearing inside of her as she grinded into him harder.

Ellie whimpered.

She raised her hips again so that her clit was parallel with Joel's bulge, and she rubbed it into him.

'I… Joel…,' she let him know as she felt the familiar rush of pleasure take over her body. But then Joel slid his hands into her underwear, grabbed her ass, and pulled her into him harder. His rough hands on her sensitive skin shocked and excited her. Ellie's slit was open and sliding in the juices in her underwear. She couldn't control the hard, fast speed that Joel had her going at. Instead of fading, her orgasm built higher than she knew it could, making her vagina feel warm and wet and massaged all over. She couldn't stop shaking. 'Joel. Fuck. Joel,' she moaned incoherently. Ellie kept moving her hips automatically, in shock. Eventually she collapsed next to Joel and laughed.

'Holy shit. My heart won't stop racing,' she said. She covered her face with both her hands. 'Thank-you.'

Joel rolled toward her and caressed her stomach. He looked over Ellie, leaning on one elbow, and inhaled.

'You're beautiful,' he said.

Ellie smiled in embarrassment. 'How about now?' she asked as she gave herself an overbite and pulled her top lip back. 'Even prettier?' She laughed when Joel looked away nervously. She gently squeezed up and long Joel's arm as he tickled the fine, white hair under her belly button.

He leaned in and kissed her, though it felt like he was tasting her.

'You know what I'm gonna do for you?' he asked.

Ellie shook her head.

His eyes trailed down her body and his hand slipped into her underwear. A single finger slid along her clit. Ellie gasped: she was still sensitive from her orgasm. His finger moved further down and circled her opening.

'You don't have to…' Her words dissolved as the slick flesh under Joel's finger pulsed.

He hummed in satisfaction. 'I want to.' Her underwear snapped back against her skin as he removed his hand.

'Take them off,' he said.

Ellie looked at him curiously.

'Take them off,' he said with more authority.

Ellie pulled her underwear down her legs and tossed them to her side. Joel pulled one of her legs closer to him so that she lay there with her thighs apart. He unbent his elbow and lay next to her on the sheet, breathing into her neck as his finger teased her clit. Ellie moaned, letting him know that she wanted more. As his finger travelled lower and rested at her opening, Ellie angled her hips off the ground to give him better access. Slowly, he applied pressure, and pushed the tip of his finger into her. He kissed her nipples and waited for a gush of fluid before he kept moving. Ellie felt his finger angle up toward her g-spot. She couldn't believe that he was inside of her. Against her instinct to let him in deeper, her vagina tightened around his finger. Joel made a sound that was either a contained chuckle of shock or a moan of satisfaction as he felt her muscles contract. He licked her nipples faster.

Ellie felt her juices flow down to Joel's hand. She opened her eyes and saw his beard over her breast and his hand between her legs.

'Ahh… I love you,' she couldn't help saying. Tears welled in her eyes as she embraced the truth of that. She was _in love_ with him. Instead of empowering her, it caged her, chained her to him. She kept her eyes closed, scared to check his expression.

Joel pushed his finger right into her after she said that. It hurt, but it only increased Ellie's excitement. His finger circled her g-spot and Ellie thought she could feel it grow.

'Right there,' she said.

Ellie was tingling uncontrollably and the pressure was building. Then Joel surprised her and edged down between her thighs.

'What are you doing?!' Ellie asked as she sat up and tried to bring her knees back together, but his whole body lay between her legs.

'Don't worry. I'll be careful,' he said.

'No!'

'I know what I'm doing.' His eyes were sincere, but he lifted one eyebrow. _God, he's sexy_, Ellie thought.

'Okay,' she said, mostly because she was trying to trust him, and also because she was desperate to be closer to him. 'Be careful,' she echoed.

Joel lowered his head. When Ellie felt his tongue flick her clit she fell back onto the mattress. His spit made her so wet, and they slid against each other with almost no friction. His saliva ran down her slit and mixed with her own fluids.

'Are you okay?' she made herself ask.

He grunted into her.

'Oh, god, Joel.'

He began moving his finger inside her again in the same rhythm that he was licking her clit. It was almost as though those two spots were different sides of the same coin, making her whole vagina swell and tremble. The electric shocks grew and their arms buzzed over her legs and stomach. When Joel moved his arm up and pinched one of Ellie's nipples, her orgasm burst inside her. She thrust her hips and ground her sex into Joel's face. His beard pricked her but she kept rubbing her juices over his mouth as she came hard. Joel pushed his tongue against her harder.

When Ellie began to shiver and had to stop she found that she was crying.

Joel wiped his mouth on his forearm and lay down beside her. A laugh escaped when she felt his strong arms wrap around her.

'I'm sorry… I'm just…'

'It's okay. I've gotcha.'

She closed her eyes and brushed his chest hair with her lips.

When her breathing calmed, she asked, 'What are we going to do?'

'Go back to Tommy's,' he said as if he'd been thinking about it. 'You can make your mind up then.'

'And yours.'

He stroked the top of her head. 'I know what I want.'

'Do you want me?' _Fuck. Ellie had only meant to think that. She didn't want to put him on the spot and tug an answer out of him he hadn't thought through. _

'I want you safe,' he said. Ellie tensed away from him, but Joel pulled her back. 'I don't mean that you need protectin'. You don't need me for that, that's for sure.' His hand momentarily lifted off her back as he waved his hands for answers. 'You shouldn't have to worry about your next meal, I mean. Learn to swim. Grow up a little. And if you still want to go searchin' for Fireflies, that's—'

'—Fireflies?' She sat up in front of him and folded her arms to cover her breasts as best she could. Pushing them flat just gave her a ridiculous cleavage over her arms. _Where's my shirt? Downstairs. Shit. _'I'm not looking for Fireflies. That dream is over. I _know_ that.' She didn't mean to attack Joel again, but she couldn't ignore his role in unraveling their plans. _Unraveling and burning the pieces_. He swallowed and narrowed his eyes. 'I didn't mean it like… That's not what I'm doing.'

'What are you doing?'

'What?' Ellie, somehow, wasn't prepared for that question. Each cheek flushed. _He's going to think I'm a stupid kid, reading comic books… There's no way to phrase this without sounding crazy…_ 'Help people.'

'You mean… save people?'

'I know what you're thinking, but I'm stronger and faster now. I learnt so much from you, and I know I'm not going to save the world; I'm not an idiot; though there has to be _something_ left doing or _someone_ worth saving.' Joel's cheekbones sharpened as he withheld whatever criticisms he had ready. 'Even if I'm just patching people up, like in the Q.Z., I don't care, but my life has to mean something again.'

'Your life does mean something. Don't you get that? That's why you can't run through hell dodgin' bullets.' He leant forward as he spoke and pointed to the window. 'You're too important to end up as dinner!'

Her heart stopped. _Why the fuck would he bring David up? _She stepped off the bed and pulled her jeans off the floor. She couldn't find her underwear. A cold shake rattled through her arms.

'Look, Ellie, I'm sorry,' he said from the bed. 'I don't want to tear down whatever's goin' on in your head.'

'Fuck you,' she said from behind her jeans. _Call me 'important' and 'beautiful.' The fuck does he know? Being alive and being important are complete fucking opposites_. 'What is being alive supposed to do? I can't do anything about a cure; I can't help strangers; I can't have sex. Tell me, Joel. Tell me how important my life is.'

He was quiet.

'It's not my _life _that matters,' she said. 'It's my _death_.'

Ellie let the fire burn her insides and breathed new life into the flames. _Yeah, I'm crazy. I'm an anachronism. I'm expired. I'm not supposed to be here._

Joel stepped off the bed and put his arms around her.

'I don't need you to hug me,' Ellie said. Joel squeezed her tighter. She let go of her jeans and they hung squashed between their bodies. Her neck hurt kinked against his chest and his belt buckle dug into her stomach. His chin poked into her skull.

'We'll figure it out,' he said.

His arms were so tightly wound around her that his elbows almost met at her spine. She was reminded of when he grabbed her from behind to stop her from being carried away in the current, back when she jumped off the bridge in Pittsburg. _He's not letting me go_.

She tried to inch away so that she could take a breath.

_He's not letting me go_.

'Joel… I'm okay…' she lied so that he would drop her.

_He's not letting me go_.

She closed her eyes and felt the salt water throw her in Joel's direction. She choked on the waves and coughed the salt back into her mouth. She saw the rocks ahead and felt Joel's arms cover her chest and her neck. She felt his body against her back as they spiraled through the current together. He groaned into her neck as his body cracked against a rock.

Ellie wrapped her arms around his waist and, just for a minute, embraced the discomfort of his love.


End file.
